What's been
happening
at Lexden

Airports are busy places with many different stakeholders with very different objectives. In that environment, the end customer can often be forgotten or marginalised. Whether it’s being taken on a meandering detour through a retail jungle when you are in search of a departure gate, struggling to understand why it feels like there is only one loo for every 1,000 passengers or having to sprint to meet the person picking you up so they avoid a £50 fine for waiting to greet you for more than 5 minutes.

That said, despite pressures from retailers and regulators, some airports can be inspirations with a wealth of Customer Experience ideas for any practitioners to learn.

#1 Managing your customers’ expectations

Too often brands miss the opportunity to reduce their customer’s anxiety. Filling the gaps explaining what will happen next and when it will happen not only legitimise the important on-going engagement with customers, but it also demonstrates they know how to help customers, recognising enhancing their emotional state connects with customers at a deeper level.

It’s played out brilliantly here. The time it will take to get to the departure gate is blasted to the ground. The anxious passenger can now assess their situation and with every 30 second increment displayed, they can track their progress. If enough time, the passenger can relax more. If the passenger is short of time, they can speed up. Either way the signpost on what is otherwise a redundant space is helpful and increasing appreciation of the airport.

#2 Personalising the experience

I’ll never forget being at an Airline conference where a customer aviation expert claimed the future of airline travel was about personalisation. Only to then present several airline ticket, insurance and hotel bundles labelled as ‘the weekender’ and ‘family fun’ proposition which he boasted when bought together were actually more expensive than the individual parts. But it would be made so complicated that customers wouldn’t be able to work it out. Even worse than this, the audience applauded! I felt very alone sitting on that panel debate.

Personalisation means something very different to me. I feel this example explains it well. At Copenhagen, like many airports all passengers need to pass through the baggage collection section to get to the exit. Those with only hand luggage don’t need to get caught up in there, so this example below is personalised to that segment.

The only thing that matters to this audience is getting through the airport fast and one with their trip – after all it’s in part why they’ve crammed everything in to their hand luggage. This message connects with what matters most to that customer type. Personal doesn’t need to be 1 to 1, it’s about being relevant to specific needs.

#3 Keep customers before you lose them

Some sectors are guilty of this more than others. Here’s the scenario. The retail company knows it has a problem with it’s returns because they see social media noise and get angry calls to the call centre. But it’s not tracked in VoC because the VoC vendor hasn’t scoped it in their requirements. So, first the additional work is scoped and paid for. Feedback is then collected. There is a delay in acting on the feedback until there is enough evidence to make it statistically valid. The CX team get to work on it (maybe after some more mapping) and eventually the team identify it’s down to the poor service contract in place with the outsourced collection courier company. But procurement say the contract is locked down for 12 more months on the terms agreed (which were never checked with customers). Following which a change can be looked at. 6 months on and the CX team start to work out what’s needed (a new collection courier company) and put together the Requirements Specification for a new vendor selection process. Which they initiate 6 months later.

In the meantime all the customers have left!

Why not share progress with customers throughout? If you know something’s wrong, flag it. As you start to get an inclination of what’s gone wrong, get on to it. Don’t wait for the 75th complaint to make it valid. And tell your customers you know it’s not working, why and that you are on to it. Share your plans with on how you will get it right and by when. Offer customers the chance to put in their views to help get to a better place.

This example explains why there is disruption, what the improved airport areas will offer and helps passengers engage with the change. Even if they don’t get to benefit from the change they know it’s happening and why so are comfortable with it. So rather than moan about disruption, they can appreciate the move from ‘AS IS’ to ‘TO BE’.

So that just leave the extra 1/2

For me this is about observation. Customer Experience is all around us. We interact and are a part of a company’s intentions every day. There are lessons to learn daily.

I didn’t make a b-line for Copenhagen Airport to write a blog on my customer experience observations, I was there to help a client structure a business case for CX investment against return. But whether it’s walking through Copenhagen Airport on the return leg of a work trip, purchasing corner flags online from Sports Direct for a team development workshop (which turn up after they were needed) or noting how many companies follow-up and remember what you were interested at the Grand Designs Show (AXA weren’t making the most of their investment there – I’m still waiting for a follow-up two weeks later), opportunity for CX ideas are everywhere.

So, put a Moleskin pocket-book on your birthday list, set you iPhone to camera mode and build your own insight bank of CX ideas and inspiration as you go about your daily business.

In the meantime, feel free to review our blogs, or contact me to borrow examples from my much cherished collection.

To finish, when it comes to finding new ideas for CX, as Ferris Bueller, the most eligible bachelor of them all put it…

We see the benefit to you as follows:

Identify where you are ahead or behind others in terms of your CX progress

Assess what progress looks like, to ensure you are good shape to get there

Help you assess where you are ahead of any resource decisions coming up

Get a quick read (within 3 days) with minimum impact on the business

Provide current state insight which you can share with others helping you take CX forward

Validate or challenge advice and recommendations received from current CX partners

Receive an independent observation separate to any vendor supported opinions

As independents we have no invested interest in the outcome

We include consideration of feedback platforms and other technologies alongside the other key areas of CX rather than the focus as is often the case with vendor assessments. We are in the business of best practice guidance and effective advice rather than tech solutions. So our report provides you with a broader appreciation of how far you’ve progressed.
Each of the key practice areas (such as channel management, accountability, tech, adoption, measurement and culture) are graded from ‘Unaware’ to ‘Differentiating. The grading is based on Lexden’s extensive experience in setting up and improving clients CX programmes. Your progress is plotted accordingly with an output report highlighting your overall progress and breaking this down across key areas. A comparison of your performance to other companies is also made across each area.More than one assessment per company can be completed. This means you can use the approach to gauge the variance in perceptions of CX progress across the business between different individuals, levels, roles, departments, locations or even brands in a group set up. Let us know if this is the intended purpose and we will aggregate results as well as supply specific reports.Click this link to the survey which will take 10-15 minutes to complete. Information collected is confidential. Once the assessment is complete we will confirm this and forward the output within 3 days.

How to achieve 600% from your Customer Experience Programme

If you are looking for something more comprehensive we also provide a robust assessment of the profitability level your CX programme is achieving, bench-marked against over 1,000 organisations. Adapting the award winning CX Typology(c) Measuring Customer Experience research of Dr Professor Phil Klaus, we assess your current programme against 47 practice points. Arriving at a score, CXPPA (Customer Experience Programme Profitability Assessments) pin points where improvements in your programme should be focused, and how to align your actions to those of organisation who are driving 600% more from their CX programmes. To receive more information on this exclusive assessment please contact us. [contact-form]
If you’d like to receive more articles on driving more profitable Customer Experience, please sign up to our free monthly ‘Customer Experience Update’.
Lexden helps deliver effective customer experience insight, strategy, content and creative activation clients seeking sustainable profit from customer experience.
If you’ve got a CX challenge, see if we can help.

With 90% of CEO’s prioritising Customer Experience as a leading business practice(1), financial scrutiny on performance will only increase to retain board confidence and commitment. However, 90% of programmes are failing to deliver (2) their potential.

How can you be sure Customer Experience investment is correctly prioritised?

Most manuals and professional CX speakers would advise practioners to fix what’s upsetting customers and move on to making a point of distinction on what they rave about. Which should push up satisfaction and recommendation scores.

However, both these customer experience strategies require investment to succeed. What if there is no budget? Can you ‘hedge’ the required investment against incremental sales/profit this focus will deliver? It’s probably not that safe to do so. Evidence shows that only 1% of share of category can be reliably attributed back to these conventional measures (email me if you want more on why this is).

A more linear approach is to show the reduction in ‘bad demand’ operational costs associated with managing activities creating negative feedback on specific touchpoints. This would show an accountable reduction in costs. Albeit costs created by a bad customer experience in the first place. So should they be classed as a win, or an own goal? Either way, it’s a start.

This gives you the two more common strategies for CX growth pursued:

Improve that which the business is poor at but customer’s value (also known as the ‘Fix’ phase)

Leverage that which the business is good at and customer’s value (also known as ‘Build’ phase)

The shortfall here is that the hit list for these strategies rely on customer’s feeding back about what’s great and what’s not. But what if customers don’t vex about an issue? And why wouldn’t they – because it’s not on their radar? What if there’s nothing wrong or right about an experience but because it’s not important to customers it never gets raised? With most VoC set ups if you don’t hear about it often it gets considered not worth looking at.

A conventional approach focuses on capturing feedback on customer’s sentiment and intention. But as proved on most voting days, intention and behaviour are often distant relatives. Whereas, understanding actual behaviour caused by Customer Experience is evidence of what customer’s do.

So rather than only asking how satisfied a customer is with an activity or experience, or which activities they are satisfied with or otherwise, understanding how important an activity is to a customer’s share of category commitment brings behavioural based measurement in to CX. Actual behaviour is a significantly more reliable indicator of decision making than intention.

This moves the focus from knowing some of what’s going on, to knowing everything

With fix and build programmes linked to CSAT and NPS inferred scores, there is a read on, ‘what we are good at and what we are not so good at’. By complimenting this with behavioural change insights we are now answering, ‘what customer experiences matters most to a customer’s decision to commit share of category’. This adds the missing commercial dimension to CX performance management and with it reveals two further CX strategies for practioners to pursue. As well as sharpen the purpose of the ‘Improve’ and ‘Leverage’ strategies too:

Monitor and refine/remove CX which the business is poor at and does not impact customer’s decision to commit to us

Improve CX which the business is poor at but impacts customer’s decision to commit to us

Leverage CX which the business is good at impacts customer’s decision to commit to us

Explore the potential in CX Opportunities which the business is good at but does not impact customer’s decision to commit to us

These are shown in Lexden’s MILO matrix below, which enables prioritisation of CX investment.

The ‘Monitor’ strategy identifies investment which is under-performing and not needed (or as the headline state where a company is ‘wasting money on CX’).

With conventional feedback this insight isn’t unearthed because it’s the customer experience that doesn’t matter to customers, so it rarely gets asked for or feedback provided – whether it’s good or bad. But if this collated less meaningful activity can be refined, reduced or removed and rationalised costs redeployed to the ‘Improve’ and ‘Leverage’ strategies.

Which leaves the ‘Opportunity’ strategy, which provides untapped potential for new areas to consider. These could provide future advantage in a maturing CX-led organisation if reshaped and made important to the customer’s decision making or outcomes fulfilment.

You may be questioning this only works if you know what activities matter in the first place, and their relative degree of importance. If you were starting from scratch that would take longer and cost more to work out than would be of use.

Fortunately, the missing golden insight is already available

Leading CX academic Dr Professor Phil Klaus developed a quality of experience measure which identifies which customer experiences impact customer’s behavioural decisions. In conjunction with Prof Klaus, we work with this leading edge CX insight measure, which means we can now add ‘behavioural change’ insight to existing NPS and CSAT measures to create the missing commercial rigour CX deserves.

With ten years and over 1,000 case studies complete, this award-winning insight informs companies on ‘what matters most’ and ‘what doesn’t matter at all’ when it comes to customer experiences impacting share of category decision making. By identifying the most important 25 customer attributes and experiences (refined from a total of 300), the ‘Experience Quality Measure’ accounts for up to 88% of a customer’s decision making. Making it the most reliable CX measurement available.

Each individual study completed highlights the specific set of activities and their relative importance for that company. No two outcomes are the same making it the unique CX DNA of a company. The principal advantages of this approach are as follows:

It doesn’t matter which CX measure you have in place already, or which VoC platform you use, we run a one-off separate study alongside what’s already in place.

The volume of customer contacts engaged to arrive at the experience measure is around 125, so it’s a much smaller study all round, than a VoC programme commitment

We are now into our third year working with the approach and translating the academic science into a more workable and accessible insight source for clients to prove profitability from CX

The measurement won’t shift overnight, because it’s based on actual behaviour change, not just opinion. So, we recommend capturing and tracking progress annually

Competitor data is also captured which means we also know 1) who else has your customer’s share of category and 2) what customer experiences attract your customers to them

This insight can be identified and the MILO matrix complete within 8 weeks

So, there you have it. The ability to identify what drives share of category rather than just favourable commentary. The confidence to pull out from your plan those activities which matters least. The insight to keep ahead of your competition in CX. Which means CX leaders can demonstrate to budget holders that CX investment isn’t being wasted. In fact, with all four of the MILO strategies pursed it’s driving profitable growth.

If you’d be interested to see how it works with a case study or how easy it is to add this essential CX insight to the CX governance, please contact christopherbrooks@lexdengroup.com

If you’d like to receive more of these, and other articles on driving more profitable Customer Experience, please sign up to our newsletter.

Lexden helps deliver effective customer experience insight, strategy and solutions for clients seeking sustainable profit from customer experience. If you’ve got a CX challenge, see if we can help.

(1) Bain (2) Dr Professor Phil Klaus

We’ve been running a series of interviews with CX Directors charged with shaping and driving their company’s Customer Experience. With several now complete, we thought we’d pause and share the articles as a collection.

At Lexden, we are committed to customer experience as an effective business model. And whilst we enjoy applying our expertise to help clients leverage the effectiveness of their programmes, we believe much of what needs to be done can be done by taking inputs from others in the same role. Which means you need external support less, but when it is needed, it’s valued more.

With utilities, retail, entertainment and finance covered we hope there are tips and advice in here for everyone.

How intu Are Revolutionising the Destination Shopping Experience for Consumers

Read the full interview with Roger Binks, Director of Customer Experience. Click here.

At British Gas a Customer Strategy Is Useless, Unless People Believe in It

Can you solve the formula
to the right? If you paid as much attention to algebra as me in maths lessons at school, probably not.

That said, I can almost guarantee that you do understand the formula (or at the very least will by the end of this blog!).

In my time working on a very progressive service initiative in the commercial insurance area, the organisation I was with were responsible for a huge upturn in their new business, rate and retention results by understanding that just because a customer doesn’t choose you this time, doesn’t mean they will make the same decision the next time round.

What will dictate their next decision will be the feelings and associations they have of you and your brand as a result of the experience you gave them.

I listened in to a call once where a city Broker spoke with our Trader to say he was placing a £900k risk with a rival insurer after three months of effort on our Traders part. I’ll never forget the startled reaction of the Broker as our trader told him:

“not a problem, well done, you’ve done a great job to get that price. We’d love to speak with you about it again next year, I’ll put something in our diaries as a reminder”.

Not only did we win back the risk the next year, but we got a lot more incremental business in the following 12 months from the Broker.

Moving on to an example of a slightly smaller value, my mortgage company with whom I also have a credit card and a debit card (let’s call it a 321 debit card) recently failed to apply the new rate I had chosen following my initial two year rate coming to its end. They said they hadn’t received the letter, I knew I had sent it – it was their word against mine and as a result of the mistake, I had been overpaying for three months.

As the conversation unfolded, it became clear that the experience I had expected; application of the new rate going forwards, and no reimbursement for me, wasn’t going to happen. In fact, the excellent, empathetic, and well trained advisor applied and backdated the rate, taking the corresponding amount of money off my next mortgage payment.

Am I likely to move my mortgage or any of my cards now? Not a chance.

We at Lexden take the same view. We feel that when deciding whether to set out on a CX journey or not, the last thing any organisation should do is call in the consultants to decide for them.

It sounds counter-intuitive coming from a CX consultant, but it’s something that we beleive must be owned and driven from within rather than outsourced. It can lead to a complete lack of ownership of CX within the business.

Whereas we find the most fruitful engagements are those with clients who have a clear desire to deliver excellent experiences. We do of course help them understand what matters most to their customers and how to amplify their authentic difference through customer experience, but throughout we are ensuring ownership, drive and knowledge rests with our clients.

Our experience of this approach has led to client’s inviting us back in and welcoming us rather than judging the value of CX support provided, time after time. This is my understanding of customer lifetime value (even if I still can’t quite decode the equation!)

Earlier this week, we hosted an impromptu gathering of CX leaders for an afternoon tea and a chance to share best practice and trade battles scar stories. One of the areas discussed was the growing number of Customer Experience events and conferences now running.

Some said they went often, some not at all. But all agreed there are so many now it’s difficult to keep on top of what’s happening and which events you will get the most value from.

We worked out that if you attend all events you would need a budget of more than £200,000 and over 100 days on the road each year. Increase the budget and you could be travelling from Dallas to Dublin to Dubai to furnish your CX knowledge banks!

With Customer Experience being such a popular and potentially profitable business model, the signs are that the conference circuit will only be getting busier!

Which is why we have decided to compile a complete list of all Customer Experience events provided by event promoters and vendors in one place. That way anyone thinking of attending can compare and plan where to go more easily.

Initially, it will be a listing with some basic criteria highlighted (e.g. sectors, top speakers, location, dates of events, prices, formats, link to websites etc.). But over time we intend to extend the criteria and gather ratings and opinions from those who attend. All of which should allow anyone looking to attend an event a more informed decision.

If of interest to you, sign up and we will send you the listing.

[contact-form]

We will be producing a free quarterly listing of what CX events are coming up. We may eventually set this up on our website with filters so you can search based on sectors, dates, prices etc. Our first listing will be released later this month.

Why attend CX events at all? We support attending the right events. Having spoken and attended before, I know if you pick the right event it will be jam-packed with insight, ideas and inspiration. You can meet some wonderful people in CX there who are generous with the benefit of their experience and will walk away with learning relevant to your business challenges. All of which adds up to a day well spent.

But pick the wrong event and you could be listening to other people’s worlds failing to connect them to yours, feel passively sold to by vendors, find yourself edging into a corner to lunch away from the over-networking crowd and eventually decide that the ‘not quite so urgent’ email needs immediate attention and leave early.

So why are we doing this? We are independent Customer Experience Consultants and not associated with any group or vendor running these events. Those who know us know we like to help those in CX improve their skills, what they do and what positive change they deliver. So, whenever we see the opportunity to do this we endeavour to help.

Most organisations have invested in a customer experience programme. Some are making a real success of theirs. We’ve had the pleasure of supporting some of these with their endeavours, interviewed CX leaders about their progress, judged winning CX award entries and experienced award success with our own clients.

However, we’ve also seen the evidence of programmes which fail to make the grade. There are a number of reasons for this. Sadly, it often boils down to investment in technology choices, neglecting to bring key stakeholders on the journey and chasing the wrong KPI’s.

But, any company can be transformed into delivering an award winning, world class customer experience which they are recognised for and their customers choose them over other choices for, in three steps. Furthermore, all three steps can be complete with 4 months.

Step 1 CX Programmes Profitability Alignment

Make sure the CX Programme activities are aligned to those which are known to drive success

Only 10% of CX programmes achieve their profit potential. It’s not surprising, research conducted in this area has identified there are 47 critical activities, which managed effectively, increase programme profitability by 600%. Now available as an evaluation tool (CXPPA) developed from CX Typology research(1), any organisation can benchmark how they are set up and managing CX against the world’s most successful performing programmes.

This evaluation not only benchmarks, but identifies how programmes compare to the best CX performers, as well as recommends what needs to be improved in which order to increase profitability. This step is achievable in 3 to 4 weeks.

Step 2 Prioritising What Matters Most

Know what experiences matters most to customer’s decisions to choose one brand over others

Attention should always identify ‘what matters most to customers’ early.

By which we don’t mean, how to ‘make it easy’ or how to ‘personalise the experience’, we mean understanding what drives customer’s behavioural change. This is the most reliable indicator of customer’s decision to choose one organisation over another. In addition, it is a very effective way to understand how to improve both Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.

Research conducted(2) into what drivers customer experience behaviour has identified that 25 customer drivers account for over 80% of everything any CX leader needs to know about what customers want fulfilled.

However, many of these 25 drivers have little to no influence on customer decision-making so are surplus to requirements. Which means if you reduce investment in them, performance scores stay the same, but costs can be taken out. Meaning the company is more profitable overall.

In addition, those drivers which are the most influential, are highlighted. This is where a company should focus CX investment to increase NPS, CSAT, profitability and success.

These drivers are known as Experience Quality Measures (EXQ) and are the work of Dr Professor Phil Klaus, world-renowned Customer Experience Academic.

Through Lexden, all companies can now identify their own EXQ set and with it know what to prioritise to improve their NPS and CSAT performance. This step is achievable in 4-6 weeks.

Step 3 Competitor Advantage with Customer Experience

Make sure the brand difference is amplified through the experiences

The third step, enables a company to achieve competitive advantage through customer experience. Why is this worth noting? Much customer experience efforts are operationally or technologically efficient improvements. These are typically delivered with little consideration of how to build brand distinction. This means competitors can copy the ides and therefore neutralise any brand advantage which could have been achieved. In fairness, brand doesn’t help as the brand architecture is not seen as accessible working tool to apply

However, by designing a Brand Experience Platform, this is overcome and the brand becomes an asset to the customer experience. It is made up of two principal elements:

Brand Experience Idea – which acts as a rallying cry for all colleagues to connect the advantage of the brand to the importance of customer experience, in a way which all can understand.

Branded Customer Standards – these are the set of drivers (as mentioned in step 2) which matters most to customers, translated into standards the company must deliver to in a way only they can. This is most powerful when standards relate to profitability. These ‘standards’ can then be used universally by the company to design internal practices and ways of working and external delivery and experiences. All employees can then confidently work to deliver consistent experiences, which will further reinforce brand distinction.

Step 3 is about putting a framework in place to ensure consistency and making the most of the brand. Achievable in 6-8 weeks.

So there you have it. Three steps to take any programme from where it is to world-class.

All three programmes are available from Lexden should assistance getting there be needed. We’d be happy to share more with you and see if we can add real value to your endeavours. However, ownership of what you do and why, must stay within the organisation, not leave with the consultancy or customer feedback platform provider (the fourth reason for failure!).

As you would expect from a Customer Experience Consultancy, we collect examples of good and bad practice in customer experience as sales execs collect air-miles. So the office conversation often turns to something we’ve seen or experienced and what impact we feel it has on customer’s future commitment to that brand.

We took this ‘I wonder’ a little further and created two twitter characters to collect stories from people too. Grumpy persona @vexvox collects and distributes stories from others on the woes of customer experience, whilst his upbeat cousin @fondfox shares applauds stories of positive customer experience.

If you want to here what people have been saying about your brand, let us know

Name(required)

Email(required)

Company Name

Keeping the mood on customer experience light, we’ve collated our favourite three experiences from last year. We hope you find these examples inspirational and can see how the ‘themes’ involved can be taken back and embedded in to your own programmes.

#1 Adidas (Christopher, MD, Lexden)

July 2016 and walking down the Champs-Elysee my son spots an Adidas store. Despite his heart being set on a pair of Nike ‘sock’ football boots for his birthday the following month, we go in.

In the store, we were approached. When we mentioned the sock boot the assistant said the only way to know if the Adidas boot might be better is to play football in them. At which point he got a pair out which my son tried. The Adidas assistant also got out a ball and turned the shop into a training ground; passing, lobbing over clothes rails and shooting at walls. My son stated it was one of the highlights of his time in Paris. The next month he switched his allegiance and requested a pair of Adidas sock boots for his birthday. Link to full article.

#2 Wordery (Leanne, Office Manager, Lexden)

One of the gifts Leanne ordered up as a Christmas present for a nephew was an Aladdin, popup book which also played music. Although on opening it her nephew found it didn’t play anything. Fretting about how to get it returned as it had been free delivery, Leanne contacted the online retailer, Wordery. Their returns policy couldn’t have been better. They apologised, didn’t question the legitimacy of the dispute, explained even though it doesn’t happen often a replacement was in the post already. Not bad.

But what about returning the faulty book? Returns are proving to be a killer pain point in customer experience for online companies. Not with Wordery, they said no return of the book was needed, just a copy of the ISBN page details. What really impressed us was they asked if Leanne could drop the book off at a children’s home or hospital to enjoy.

#3 Mercedes-Benz (James, Senior Customer Experience Consultant)

You may be aware but Mercedes-Benz are one of the best performing customer experience brands in the world. Their CX drives contentment, commitment and contribution from their customers. This example highlights why.

James’ took his car in for a service. Most of us worry about what the costs will be and part of the anxiety is created by the ‘behind closed doors’ set-ups of garages. The layout is no different at Mercedes-Benz, but recognising this anxiety and wanting to reaffirm their transparent approach to servicing, they sent a video of the service being conducted through. It’s not a new idea, Pizza Express brought the kitchen experience into the restaurant a few years ago. But it’s still a powerful one which creates confidence in the quality of the service and therefore overall brand trust.

We hope you enjoy these varied examples from our 2016 vaults.

If it floats your boat, our monthly Customer Experience Update contains similar content as well as the latest developments in Customer Experience, successful case studies and interviews with leaders. You can the vanguards in customer experience, and subscribe for free here.

A recent visit to Bluewater involved buying some new shoes for my wife. On inspecting two different colourways of the said shoes, we inadvertently swapped their designated positions on the wall display. Having worked as Floor Manager between College and University (a good few years ago) in the Nike store in Brighton, I understand that visual merchandising does have a purpose, but what happened next led me to ask the above question.

As we stepped back to review the range again, an employee of the shop then walked over (without asking us if we needed any help may I add) to stand in front of the shoes, and moved the two shoes back to their original positions, while being so far in to our personal space that we had to take a couple of steps back.

No big deal really, but I can think of at least six very simple things that were wrong from a CX perspective within this ten second (non) interaction.

How did it impact our behaviour? We went and got the shoes at a direct competitor.

The thing is though, if I had gone through this with the assistant, I really don’t think he would have for one second understood why any of those six points were a poor experience, and I think his response would have been something like ‘well the shoes have to be in that order…’.

Saving the conversation about customers’ having poor experiences because internal rules and processes for another time, can you really coach Customer Experience to someone this oblivious to what’s best for the customer at any given time?

Satisfied at having a new customer experience to talk about, I began to think back to my time in the Nike sto
re – did my customers have poor experiences under my watch when I was young and single-minded? Well, yes, they did.

I can remember two instances. Firstly, obsessed with my sales figures vs. the 1st floor of the shop, I would routinely send customers upstairs for refunds so my figures weren’t affected. Secondly, I remember closing the changing room to customers once, just so I could get in and out to access mannequins/shelves/fittings etc. to work on merchandising. The area Manager turned up that day, and at the time I scoffed at his disgust that I was making people go upstairs to try on their clothes – of course now practising customer experience I acknowledge how right he was!

So, here I am now able to recognise and improve poor customer journeys – what happened? Was I coached, or did I just learn through osmosis, working in organisations who care about the customer? A mixture, is the answer. Formal coaching has had a place, customer focussed programmes and developing a Customer Experience Centres of Excellence have too, as have particular managers, whom I had great respect for.

The true answer though, if there is one, lies for me in recruitment (and the resulting culture). While my conclusion means that I slipped through the net as someone who didn’t really understand the value of every interaction with the customer at the time.

If your recruitment programme has genuine focus on recruiting staff (consistently and at all levels) who understand that everything they do has a positive or negative emotional impact on the customer at each touchpoint, the organisation itself will begin to take the shape of one that customers want to join, stay with, and talk about positively.

If you run or are involved in a customer experience programme consider how central are Recruitment to that? do they look for people with suitable customer experience tags, or individuals who can talk about emotive and commercial impact in the same sentence? I’d argue the former gives you shoes laid out in the right order, the later a deep understanding of why customer experience matters.

With 89% of companies prioritising customer experience in 2017, attention to all impacting areas on CX success come in to play if you want to drive success. If you’d like to know how to recruit the right customer experience types, contact us and we will let you in on the secret.

I should start by qualifying our definition of ‘successful’ customer experience. At Lexden we always focus on success being about customer contentment, commitment and category contribution. The outcome of which leads to an increase in contribution attributable to Customer Experience investment.

So, what drives success in CX (Customer Experience)? According to Professor Dr Phil Klaus’ published studies only 10% of companies optimise the potential returns from their customer experience efforts. The globally renowned customer experience author’s studies also show there are three qualities common to the leaders in CX.

#1 Measure What Matters

#2 Customer Culture Conviction

#3 Touch-point Management

Here we share our interpretation of these key qualities and the value of prioritising them in your business. If you would like a white paper on any of these areas of effective Customer Experience, please contact us:

Name(required)

Email(required)

#1 Measure What Matters

Too often in customer experience, customer sentiment or intention is mistaken for a measurement of customer commitment. The board sees an NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score and assumes if the number is going up, the business is performing better.

However, it has been proven there is a very low correlation between these customer scores and the share of the customer category the company has. In fact, less than 1% according to Measuring Customer Performance (Author: Prof Dr P Klaus). The method used; EXQ (Experience Quality Measure) has been refined to assess the impact of customer experience on customer behaviour.

We’ve been involved in several client commissions using EXQ, which like the hundreds of other studies conducted, has highlighted the customer experiences which really matter most to customers and the actual share of category that converts into (which is what the board often think they are getting with the conventional CX measures).

It’s powerful stuff. A recent commission we conducted highlighted EXQ was 50 times more predictive than NPS in identifying the attributes which matter most to customers. Which provides a much more robust basis for CX budget discussions!

The CX leaders are tracking indicators which align customer performance to profitability AND tell you where to prioritise investment – that’s measuring what matters.

#2 Customer Culture Conviction

‘Putting customers at the heart of business decisions’ is a sentiment we’ve stuck by and one we believe helps embed prioritising customer outcomes in the very fabric of an organisation.

However, we find the interpretation of ‘customer’ and how to incorporate customer experience in the organisation varies wildly. Most have a commitment to customer, but few have worked out what a customer really want as an outcome, and less than being able to fuse that with the differentiation their brand positioning can fulfil.

We also find that customer experience is often pushed to front line staff, those engaging with customers. However, for a culture of customer commitment to become a natural state, every colleague in the organisation needs to incorporate delivering customer outcomes in their day-to-day activities. It’s as much the responsibility of the Head of Finance or Audit as it is the Contact Centre Manager or Store Manager.

It should also not be driven by brand, but must incorporate the brand. Brand agencies grab CX budget for extraordinary demonstrations of branded customer experience, but it’s the day-to-day experiences which will be remembered and influence decision-making. Ads should demonstrate the valued CX, but not try to be the CX.

To create a culture of customer commitment in the organisation you need:

Common place behaviours

Consistent delivery

Customer outcome driven thinking

Customisation to affirm brand advantage

To achieve this, we employ our Brand Experience Platform and Branded Customer Standards to ensure customer experience is delivered by all, consistently to fulfil customer outcomes in a way that emphasis the advantage of the brand.

With the platform established, training and socialising customer experience principles is straightforward. Which means translation and adoption happens.

#3 (Outsourced) Touch-point management

We have plenty of experience in customer journey mapping for clients. The value of these working documents is that they unearth excellence and shortfalls in CX. If equipped with the right tools (such as Customer Standards or EXQ Customer Attributes) the business can set about improvements.

That said, mapping is a very useful activity to identify what is and isn’t managed ‘on us’. What about those activities which are with third parties to complete? This recent example highlights the point well. A client noticed despite a high satisfaction rating on their VoC (Voice of the Customer) touch-points, client attrition was high so engaged Lexden to investigate.

We conducted a couple of days’ of exploratory journey mapping across several country regions. By doing so we identified the most important touch-points and then realised some had been outsourced to a third-party administer some time ago. It wasn’t clear why it had been set up this way, but it hadn’t been recognised as valuable to the overall customer experience before.

It was now managed through a procurement relationship where the annual emphasis was on reducing supplier costs by 10%. The squeeze was put on the supplier who had no relationship with the client (so used Google to better understand their company) and the impaired experience was leading to defection. But because there was no VoC set up against this outsourced touch-point it didn’t show on the feedback reports.

When you assess how much of a brand’s total ‘experience’ is outsourced, it can add up to an alarming amount. In the airline sector for some carriers more than 50% of customer interactions are outsourced; from website booking, ticketing, check-in, baggage handling and customer service. But whilst the customer perceives it’s the airline’s responsibility they will blame them when these touch-points fail.

Outsourcing can lead to irrecoverable customer dissatisfaction. Use Customer Journey Techniques to evaluate the efficiency v effectiveness of outsourcing.

We hope you can take these priorities back to your own programmes and review their effectiveness. If you’d be interested to head more or need either quick-fix or strategic support, we can help.

At Lexden, we’ve developed programmes to manage the most impacting drivers of customer experience success. Overviews on EXQ, Brand Experience Platform and Effective Touch-point Management are available on request; christopherbrooks@lexdengroup.com.